Oil executive and second wife fight in a London hotel in row over his affair
with a woman 36 years younger

An oil executive is facing the threat of a landmark criminal prosecution for trying to hide his money in a divorce battle.

The 62-year-old businessman kept secret offshore bank accounts, forged bank statements and even claimed to be making maintenance payments to his dead first wife — in an attempt to reduce the amount he would have to pay his second wife.

Even the husband’s legal team, which had been kept in the dark, described its client’s actions as “the big lie”. The judge is now expected to refer the executive, who cannot be named for legal reasons, to the Crown Prosecution Service.

In doing so, according to divorce lawyers, he would become the first spouse to face criminal charges for trying to keep his assets hidden and could face a lengthy jail term.

In a previous high-profile case, the tycoon Scott Young was sent to jail for six months for “flagrant” contempt of court for refusing to disclose details of his finances in a battle with his former wife Michelle. In that case no criminal investigation was mounted.

The latest acrimonious divorce — the parties are known only as US and SR — has been running for more than two years and has cost more than £1 million in legal fees. The couple’s remaining net wealth is estimated at more than £4 million.

The marriage began to disintegrate when the businessman began an affair with a woman 36 years his junior. Its collapse was cemented when police were called to a London hotel, where the wife accused the husband of assaulting her.

He was arrested, and led out of the hotel in handcuffs in front of work colleagues. The husband claimed his wife had punched him twice and tried to smother him with a pillow. Police brought no charges.

The executive subsequently divorced his second wife, who is Russian, and married wife number three, now aged 26.

She too faces a criminal inquiry for helping him to falsify bank statements submitted in official court papers.

Mrs Justice Jennifer Roberts said the husband’s lies to the court were “conduct of the most egregious nature”. She added: “He has shown himself to be contemptuous of his former wife and equally contemptuous of this court.”

The judge added she would consider “referring the matter elsewhere” at a hearing in the summer.

The judgment discloses how he lied to the court about maintenance payments he was making to his first wife, to whom he had been married for 16 years. The husband did not disclose that she had died in January 2013.

The executive, according to the court papers, met his second wife while on one of his frequent business trips to Moscow in the mid-1990s.

At that time, he was in his 40s and she was 26. They had three children, now aged 19, 17 and 13, and he was promoted to chief executive of a large oil company in an unnamed Asian country.

The family bought a series of properties in Russia and in England, although by 2010 the marriage had fallen apart over his affair with a woman from Kazakhstan, whom he met while on business. He was 59 and she was 23.

The businessman was earning around £800,000 a year, tax free, which was paid into a Virgin Islands account. But in 2010, with the marriage on the rocks, he insisted his contract had not been renewed and he had lost his job.

In fact, several hundred thousand pounds a year continued to be paid into two secret accounts set up in Dubai and in Jersey “to protect those payments” from his wife.

The court papers show how the second wife was deeply affected by the split, becoming “completely exhausted and overwhelmed” and taking anti-depressants. Mrs Justice Roberts found her evidence “confusing, inconsistent and in some respects misleading”, especially over the sale of three Russian properties.

But Mrs Justice Roberts reserved scathing criticism for the oil executive, whom she described as “obviously capable of highly dishonest and discreditable behaviour”.

Lawyers acting for the wife said the evidence of his fraud only emerged after a court order was sought to obtain the original bank statements.

Julian Ribet, partner at specialist divorce and family law solicitors, Levison Meltzer Pigott, who acts on behalf of the wife said: “When we took over this case our client had real concerns about some of the documents that had been produced by the husband, so we approached the Court on her behalf and sought specific orders enabling us to verify whether the documentation that he had provided was in fact genuine.

“It subsequently became clear that the husband in this case was guilty of the most serious case of dishonest disclosure that I have come across in my 15 years of practice.

“It is now up to the Judge to decide how to deal with this husband, which she will do at the conclusion of the case.”